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Scientific Expertise in Situations of Controversy: A Sociological Testimony

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Yannick Barthe
Yannick Barthe*
Affiliation:
CNRS – EHESS, Paris
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Abstract

While there is now a large amount of social science research on scientific expertise, testimonies made by sociologists who themselves participated in scientific expertise on a controversial topic remain rare. It is this type of feedback and testimony that this paper will articulate and discuss. The aim is to propose a series of reflections on scientific expertise from a personal experience: the participation of the author as a sociologist in an expert committee set up by the former French Agency for the Safety of Health, the Environment and Work (AFSSET) on the topic of radio-frequencies. Several problematic aspects of scientific expertise will thus be discussed from this concrete experience: the problem of the composition of the expert group and the issue of conflict of interest, the way in which the work of expertise is organized within the group, the effects of the presence of an observer from an association, and the differences between scientific work and scientific expertise.

Type
Symposium on the use of Social Sciences in Risk Assessment and Risk Management Organisations in Europe and North America
Information
European Journal of Risk Regulation , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 14 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014

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References

1 According to the procedure adopted for the constitution of the Agency's expert panels, each expert was selected after officially being “sponsored”, following a public call for applications. Each application was examined by the Agency's scientific committee, which accepted or rejected it on the basis of the candidate's competencies and other parameters such as the risk of a conflict of interests.

2 At a GT meeting I heard the following comment: “As I often say, if the precautionary principle had been invented before kitchen knives, we wouldn't be able to cut our meat.

3 Throughout the entire period, the panel met four times for a oneday session, and nine times for sessions of two consecutive days, that is, an average of at least once a month.

4 Sheila Jasanoff, “Technologies of Humility: Citizen Participation in Governing Science”, 41 Minerva (2003), pp. 233 et sqq.

5 Philippe Roqueplo, Entre savoir et décision, l'expertise scientifique (Paris, INRA Éditions, 1997).